# Claude Sonnet 5 Intro Pricing Expires August 31, Cost Jumps 50%

> Anthropic's introductory pricing for Claude Sonnet 5 ends on August 31, and the change is steeper than the headline rate suggests. List prices move from $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output to $3 and $15 on September 1, a 50 percent jump. On top of that, a new tokenizer can count up to 35 percent more tokens for the same text, so the effective cost climbs even higher than the sticker increase implies. That detail is the part worth internalizing. Model pricing is usually discussed as a simple per-token rate, but the tokenizer quietly determines how many tokens a given prompt actually costs, and a change there compounds with any rate hike. There is cushioning for teams that plan ahead. Sonnet 5 performs close to the pricier Opus 4.8 while remaining the default model for Free and Pro plans, and Anthropic points to batch processing for 50 percent savings and prompt caching for up to 90 percent. For anyone running Sonnet 5 at volume, the takeaway is practical: the real bill after August 31 depends as much on how you structure requests as on the rate card itself.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Anthropic · Published Monday, August 3, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Anthropic's introductory pricing for Claude Sonnet 5 ends on August 31, and the change is steeper than the headline rate suggests. List prices move from $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output to $3 and $15 on September 1, a 50 percent jump. On top of that, a new tokenizer can count up to 35 percent more tokens for the same text, so the effective cost climbs even higher than the sticker increase implies. That detail is the part worth internalizing. Model pricing is usually discussed as a simple per-token rate, but the tokenizer quietly determines how many tokens a given prompt actually costs, and a change there compounds with any rate hike. There is cushioning for teams that plan ahead. Sonnet 5 performs close to the pricier Opus 4.8 while remaining the default model for Free and Pro plans, and Anthropic points to batch processing for 50 percent savings and prompt caching for up to 90 percent. For anyone running Sonnet 5 at volume, the takeaway is practical: the real bill after August 31 depends as much on how you structure requests as on the rate card itself.

## Source

[Read the full story at Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-5)

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